Israel’s Red Line in Syria

President Barack Obama has his red line for intervening in the Syrian civil war. And, as events over the weekend showed, Israel has its own—and it’s Hezbollah.

On Friday and Sunday, Israeli jets reportedly struck targets around Damascus, the Syrian capital, leaving explosions and cratered wreckage in their wake. Friday’s attack appeared to be directed at a shipment of missiles. According to the Times, the Sunday attack, which was much larger, struck bases controlled by the Syrian Republican Guard, warehouses for long-range missiles, and a chemical-weapons facility. The Israeli airstrikes have raised fears that the conflict could spread beyond Syria’s borders. In the immediate future, the chances of a wider conflict are probably slim; Assad is too stretched to mess with the Israelis. But in the longer term, a wider war—involving Hezbollah and Iran—seems increasingly likely. The Israeli strikes are the opening shot.

Let’s go back to Obama’s red line. As I detail in a piece for the magazine this week, President Obama and his aides have been grappling with what to do to stop the bloodletting in Syria, where more than seventy thousand people have died and three and a half million have fled their homes. Syria is a humanitarian catastrophe, but so far the President has refrained from involving the United States too deeply, either by giving the rebels overt military support or attacking Assad’s regime.

But President Obama has drawn a line—a red line—on the use of chemical weapons. On several occasions, Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons, or even preparations to use them, could trigger some sort of American response, or at least a shuffling of the options. He’s been justifiably vague about precisely how large a chemical attack would have to be before the U.S. reacted, and what form that would take. This is the crucial question: Where, exactly, is the red line, and what’s on the other side? The White House believes that chemical weapons have been used at least twice, and there are credible reports of incidents in three other places, all on a relatively small scale. The Administration wants to be sure that it can connect the chemical attacks to the Assad regime. Even so, the more indisputable it is that Assad is using his chemical arsenal, the greater the political pressure on Obama to do something about them.

To use force against Assad’s chemical arsenal would almost certainly be bloody and messy, and possibly mean the loss of American lives. As Gary Samore, who until February was President Obama’s advisor on weapons of mass destruction, told me for my piece, “All the options are horrible.”

Which brings us to Israel. When it comes to Syria, Israel is fighting a different war than the one that the United States would likely involve itself in. If the U.S. were to intervene, it would almost certainly do so to stop the Assad regime from massacring its own people or from using chemical weapons on a large scale. Israel, in short, is trying to stop Hezbollah. Syria is the crucial bridge between Hezbollah and its patron, Iran. If you look at a map of the Middle East, you can draw a line, running east to west, from Tehran through Syria and into Lebanon, where Hezbollah resides. This is commonly known as “the Shiite Axis,” as Iran and Hezbollah are predominantly Shiite. (Syria is ruled by a minority Alawite sect, which is an offshoot of Shiism—but the country, like most of the rest of the Arab world, is majority Sunni.)

The Iranian regime helped create Hezbollah in the early nineteen-eighties, and it has sustained the group ever since. Indeed, without Iranian weapons, money, and advisers, it’s hard to imagine that Hezbollah could exist at all. Israel and Hezbollah fought a short, intense war in 2006; it was an unexpectedly difficult fight for Israeli forces, which were surprised by the sophistication of Hezbollah’s weaponry. Since 2006, both Israel and Hezbollah have been reloading, getting ready for the next war. (I wrote about Hezbollah for the magazine earlier this year.) Syria has been Hezbollah’s primary conduit for Iranian arms. Largely for this reason, Hezbollah has been intervening in Syria to save the Assad regime, sending advisers and even fighters, who are being killed there. At the moment, Hezbollah is estimated to have about fifty thousand rockets and missiles, including Scuds, which can hit targets across Israel. The next war will be very bad.

Israel has been getting ready for war with Hezbollah, too. Israel’s generals have made it clear that they are determined to prevent Hezbollah from tipping the military balance in a significant way. The Israeli strikes over the weekend—reportedly aimed at stopping missiles from going into Lebanon—were no doubt part of this strategy.

But the most terrifying prospect for Israel is not even Iranian missiles being transferred to Hezbollah; it’s the group getting a hold of Syria’s chemical weapons. That would be, to use President Obama’s phrase, a “game changer,” because Hezbollah has the means to launch such weapons into Israel. You can be sure that Israel would act—and act decisively—if it got any intelligence that Hezbollah had taken possession of sarin or VX. So far, there is no such evidence, American officials told me. For now, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah will likely remain a subdued one, with occasional spasms of violence of the type we saw over the weekend.

But for how long? Both Israel and Hezbollah are getting ready for the next war. It won’t be a small one.

Above: Members of the Israeli military maneuver during a drill in the Golan Heights near the border with Syria, on May 6th. Photograph by Menahem KahanaAFP/Getty.